Former Emmerdale actress Leah Bracknell says she is remaining 'gloriously defiant' and will not be treating this as her last Christmas, as she continues to battle cancer.

It was 15 months ago that the ex soap star was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer .

Doctors told her that surgery was not an option and chemotherapy would only extend her life by a month or two.

Yet 54-year-old Leah says she has made no special plans for Christmas with her husband Jez Hughes and her two grown daughters and that she wants her festive celebrations exactly how they've always been.

“We haven’t arranged anything, it will all be very last minute,” she says. “So, in other words, it will be exactly the same as it always is.

“I could think, ‘We are going to have the biggest Christmas tree, people will be able to see it in Cornwall, and we’ll have reindeer on the roof’.

"But that would be like saying, this might be my last Christmas, get through it and I’ll have done that. I don’t think like that.”

There will be one difference hiwever.

At this time of year, Leah is usually deep into panto season.

It became an annual ritual after she found fame as Emmerdale vet Zoe Tate, the soap world’s first openly lesbian character, nearly 30 years ago.

Leah as vet Zoe Tate in the soap back in 2002 (Image: Yorkshire Television)

But this Christmas she is not working. She says: “No one is employing me since I was diagnosed, the phone hasn't been ringing.”

Instead, Leah has focused on using her experience as a yoga and shamanic healing instructor, since leaving Emmerdale in 2006, to help her stay upbeat and channel that positive energy.

Glass half-full has become her mantra, one she believes has complimented her more conventional medical care and helped her defy the tumour so far.

It’s an outlook she wants others with cancer and terminal illnesses to embrace too.

She hopes her own experiences could help people have a more “positive relationship” with their disease.

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Doctors drained the fluid from her chest and put her on a ventilator to help her breathe, before tests revealed she had stage-four lung cancer.

Though she smoked when she was younger, she was told that could not cause the type of tumour she had.

Leah, who lives in Worthing, West Sussex, says: “Devastating doesn’t convey how shattering that diagnosis is.

“Telling my daughters was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do. I didn’t know what to do, but eventually I thought, right, I’m cried out now.

"I could have died but I was still alive – that was a gift. I had to time to tell my family how much I love them and decide how I wanted to live.”

Leah initially decided against chemotherapy as it offered her little extra time.

Zoe Tate was the country's first openly lesbian soap character and she had many explosive storylines (Image: Yorkshire Television)

She also refused to ask how long doctors expected her to live, for fear that if the prognosis was poor, part of her would accept that and it would chip away at her positive outlook.

Instead, her research suggested immunotherapy, which boosts the body’s own ability to fight the cancer, was her best chance of prolonging her life.

But it was not available on the NHS and she would have to pay for treatment privately in Germany.

Her family appealed to relatives and friends for help raising the money on a private Facebook page, but it wasn’t long before the news spread and the public raised nearly £65,000 in just two weeks.

Leah says: “I am the most private person, so it was a real shock. All of a sudden, my whole life was thrown into the public arena. That was awful, but the response from the public was overwhelming.”

Before Leah could fly out, a new consultant discovered she was eligible for a targeted drug which she qualified for thanks to her Chinese heritage on her mother’s side.

But by March this year, it was clear the new treatment was no longer working.

She had her first course of chemotherapy over the summer to help manage symptoms, which now qualifies Leah for a new immunotherapy drug only recently approved in the UK.

She says: “I tried to get into the mindset that I would work with the chemotherapy. I kept telling myself I chose to do this and it was going to make me feel better.”

For Leah, travelling to Germany remains an option, but she will need to raise even more money to fund the expensive treatment.

In the meantime, the generous donations have helped fund a range of alternative treatments, including an infrared sauna which Leah uses every day to keep her body temperature up.

She uses a range of supplements, plant oil, meditation, and has attended a shamanic festival in France. She has also completely changed her diet.

She says: “I was a vegetarian, but I had to start eating meat again. I have also cut out sugar. Cancer adores sugar.”

Despite the constant challenges and dark days, Leah – who also writes a blog somethingbeginningwithc.com – insists some of the best moments of her life have come during the last year, as she has ditched many of the menial jobs that took up so much of her time.

“I wake up every day excited. I didn’t do that before the cancer,” she says. “I’m just really glad to be here. I wasn’t expected to live that long, so I am just going to carry on, gloriously living, no matter what the doctors are saying.”